Walter van Tilburg Clark

Walter Van Tilburg Clark is one of the major figures among that first generation of Western American novelists to achieve national recognition for their work. Although a few Western writers, most notably Willa Cather, had built national reputations in the first half of the twentieth century, the region that includes the Great Plains, the high mountain country of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, the Great Basin, and the desert Southwest was generally denigrated as a cultural and literary backwater. Reacting against the romantic formulas of the “Western” popularized by Owen Wister and Zane Grey, novelists such as Clark, Vardis Fisher, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Wallace Stegner, and Frank Waters sought to redefine Western history and geog